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misanthropic_nihilist
Jul 26, 2010, 12:25 AM
Post #1 of 11
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Registered: Sep 13, 2005
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The Suburban Dirtbag’s Survival Guide.
I originally thought of titling this article “2001: A Honda Odyssey,” but I thought the current title would be catchier. The whole article is pretty long, but scanning over the bold text will give a good overview.
I’ve been living out of my 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan for the better part of the last 3 years. I’ve always loved the simplicity of traveling and sleeping in a vehicle. You go where you want, sleep where you want and don’t pay anyone a dime. When I was in my senior year of high school, I planned a college-touring road trip without my parents’ knowledge. They woke up one morning to a note saying I’d be back in a week. And what a great week it was. I traveled all throughout the northeast, ate Twizzlers, drank Mountain Dew and slept under the retractable cargo cover in the back of my ’93 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Fast forward four years, when I’m out of college and working full time in the “Real World.” I had dreams of touring the country right out of school, but my empty wallet landed me in a job two days after graduation. My ’89 Honda Accord was on its way out, and I was finally making some money, so I decided to go the way of the soccer mom and buy a minivan. I instantly took the rear bucket seats out and folded the bench seat into the floor to give me 128 cubic feet of living space.
My life was changed forever. I listened to the rain fall on my roof at night. I listened to the birds chirp in the morning. I watched the sun set and then warm my face in the morning. I spit my toothpaste out the window and peed into a Nalgene.
That fall I made plans to travel across the country for a snowboard trip in Idaho, then climb in Potrero for two weeks. At the time, I was traveling a lot for work, and spent all my time in the car prototyping van conversions in my head. Six hour drives flashed by and left me with only slivers of good ideas. Eventually I settled on a setup that I constructed and have been using ever since.
The setup hauled seven people through Mexico. It’s been across the country eight times. It’s traveled 60,000 miles. I’ve slept in it over 500 nights. This past April marked one full year of living in my van. I survived winter in the northeast, with nights down to -5 F, frozen water, frozen toothpaste, frozen laundry detergent, and frozen urine. I survived 100 F July days, 95% humidity, mosquito bites, and diarrhea. After a year, I thought I’d treat myself to a few months of living inside. I found an apartment with a month-to-month lease, and hesitantly moved some of my belongings inside. After two months, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was fed up with stuffy air, opaque walls, disconnection with nature, and mostly sitting around on my computer all day. I gave my landlord notice and moved back into my van at the end of the month. I haven’t regretted that decision once.
So what’s the point? How will this help you [the dirtbag] survive in suburbia? It’s all background information. It gives me credibility.
The Van
The Honda Odyssey is a great van to convert into a mobile shelter. With all the rear seats out, you get a 4-foot by 8-foot living area with about 4-feet of head room. I bought mine on Craigslist with 90,000 miles for less than $8,000. It gets 23 mpg on the highway with all my gear inside. Most importantly, it’s covert. There’s no pop-top, no bumper stickers, and no marijuana smoke drifting out the windows.
The conversion system has three parts:
1. The main storage system is a box exactly wide enough to just fit through the sliding doors. It’s made out of 2x4 pine and 1/2-inch plywood, and is a beast to move while empty. It’s practically impossible to move while full. The box is 20 inches tall and leaves me with 29 inches of head room. In total, the box gives me 20 cubic feet of storage space, split into two compartments. The compartment behind the driver’s seat contains my clothes, which makes it really fast to get a clean a pair of clean underwear to start the day. If I walk around to the passenger side, I can access my climbing rack, ropes, slacklines, tent, and backpacks.
2. In the hatch is the table. I store my water jug and non-perishable foods on top of the table, and keep fruit, veggies, books, pots, pans, and other rattly things under the table. The tabletop is at the perfect height for me to chop veggies and cook food on the stove (did I mention that I’m 6-foot 2-inches tall?), yet low enough that I have never singed the ceiling of my van.
3. Now here’s the ingenious part. I have a piece of 1/2-inch plywood that bridges the gap between the box and the table. Both ends sit on flanges on the box and table, and the middle is supported on the back of the folded down bench seat. When I’m in “bed mode,” it’s nothing special: just a horizontal support under the bed that is flush with the box and table. But if I need to fit more than one passenger in the van or if I want to chill out in the back and read or watch a movie, the plywood flips up and slides down behind the bench seat. In “seat mode,” I have a five-seat car, with visibility out the rear and all the storage space of bed mode.
So how well does it function as a permanent living space? Really well. I recently spent a whole day removing all the components and crawling around with a tape measure thinking of improvements or modifications to make. In the end, I decided to change nothing.
The storage system provides more than ample room to store enough clothes for a 9 to 5 job, synthetics, rain gear, and all of my climbing gear (including 2 ropes, a double rack, and enough webbing to rig a doubly redundant 100-foot long highline). I even keep a pin-stripe suit in a plastic bag that I have pressed right before I need it. Don’t scoff. I bought it at the Salvation Army for $7. When winter comes, the storage gets a little tighter with my winter coat and snowboarding gear, but I still manage to fit everything. One of the best thing about parents is their steady lifestyle and copious storage space for your off-season gear… and of course their undying love.
One of the things I do miss about living in a cage is the convenience of cooking. The trunk of a van will never match a kitchen decked out with a four-burner Viking range, oven, microwave, ample counter space, and a sink with running water. But I have cooked hundreds of meals over my white gas Coleman Double Burner. Albeit, I usually spend less than $2 per day on food and have instant oatmeal for breakfast and pasta with olive oil and Kraft parmesan cheese for dinner. In fact, while road tripping for three months, every single person I traveled with came to hate my cheap and monotonous diet. Normally healthy people would sneak away from me at rest stops to eat McDonalds hamburgers and fries. But I do love cooking, and I’ve made delectable dishes such as crab corn chowder, peach cobbler, quesadillas, and seared Old Bay chicken breast.
During all but the worst rain storms, I manage to stay 95 percent dry while cooking. Unless it’s really windy, the hatch door does a great job of keeping rain off of me and out of the van. Unfortunately, the bumper does get wet in the rain, and sitting on a dry bumper to eat my dinner and watch the sunset is one of my favorite parts of the day.
Some people are fans of the propane double burners for their simplicity. Unfortunately, unless you hook them up to a large BBQ grill tank, they’re too expensive to use everyday. And if you do splurge on the tank, it takes up a lot of room. I go through a gallon of white gas about every 6 weeks. When I buy a gallon of Coleman fuel at Walmart that equates to about $5 per month.
Somehow the storage area under my table stays really cool, so much so that I’ve dubbed it “the ‘fridge.” Even during the hottest part of the summer, chocolate stays solid and opened jars of pasta sauce stay edible for 3 or 4 days. When I splurge on fruits and vegetables, I usually buy them within 24 hours of consumption, but apples, oranges, and bananas last for days. Unless it’s winter. Unfortunately the ‘fridge doesn’t have the opposite effect in the winter. One night below freezing inside the van will turn bananas black and apples mushy. But the great thing about the winter is that milk, cheese, and yogurt last forever.
Plastic bins are essential for storing food. You can easily remove them to sort food or look for that hidden jar of Old Bay seasoning. They contain loose pieces of spaghetti and keep spilled honey from running all over your car. Once every few months you can empty the bins and hose them out. While we’re on the subject of plastic, collapsible water jugs are worth less than nothing. It didn’t take long for me to loathe my collapsible jug that constantly rolled out of the van and leaked on my plywood. Buy a hard sided jug with a valve, and always store it upright. My 8 gallon jug typically gets me through a week on the road or a couple weeks in society.
By now you’re going crazy wondering about the bed system. How does a 6-foot tall person sleep in a van with only 29 inches of head room? Quite comfortably actually, on top of my 5-inch thick Mondo crash pad. Subtracting that 5 inches actually only leaves me with 24 inches of headroom. It’s nowhere near enough room to sit up straight. But it’s sufficient to get dressed and lie on my side to read. I can even throw my pillow against the driver’s seat to prop my head up for a reclined reading position. Any tall person who has slept on a Mondo knows the feeling of a breeze on his feet, and I’m no different. If I’m sleeping alone, I can lie diagonally on the pad and get most of my body on top if it. I’ve gotten used to letting my feet dangle off the end when I have company staying overnight.
Obviously, it would be nice to be able to sit up in bed, and it would be fantastic to get dressed standing up. But having all that space to lounge around inside would tempt me away from mountain biking, climbing, slacklining, sailing, or just sitting outside. But “seat mode” does let me lounge pretty well. I spent a week in the Red a couple summers ago, and it poured every single day. I spent a lot of time hanging out on the bench seat, watching movies, and reading books. At the end of the day, it takes less than two minutes to convert back to bed mode (and it can all be done from inside the van).
Living In Suburbia
If you plan to participate in the “real world” and live in your car, there are a few very necessary things to consider.
Find a legal place to park a night. Worrying about the dreaded police spotlight every night is nerve-wracking. Campsites are expensive and national forests are typically too far out of town to be a practical place to drive to every night. Your best bet is to make friends with someone with a driveway. Use Craigslist, Facebook, and every other social network you have to find someone willing to let you park on their property. Ideally you’ll get a place for free. If not, hopefully you can barter with a few hours of yard work each month. Be nice and bring the driveway owners cookies or beer every so often. As a last resort, most Walmarts will let you sleep in their parking lot. Despite popular belief, not all Walmarts want people sleeping in their parking lots. If you do go this route, make sure you fit in by always wearing a t-shirt of three wolves howling at the moon.
Find a place to shower and use the bathroom everyday. This should not be the bathroom of the owner of your driveway, otherwise you’re basically living in that house and should be contributing to the cost of utilities. My shower and bathroom are provided by the local university. Others may have luck finding washrooms at the local climbing wall, YMCA, fitness center, or college/university. Ideally you’ll have some affiliation to allow you free access. Plan to use a pee-bottle at night. Nobody wants to roll over at 4am and see you peeing in their front yard. Good luck with this one, ladies. We’re currently experimenting with a funnel connected to a tube going out the window. So far there’s nothing solid to report.
Get an inverter and jumper cables. I have a 400 watt inverter inside my van wired directly to my van battery through the firewall, which lets me use it when the van is off. Follow the manufacturer directions for wiring it to the battery. This usually entails using 8 gauge wires and putting a fuse on the positive cable right next to the positive battery terminal. Make sure the inverter has a low battery alarm and a USB port to charge mp3 players, phones, etc. Get in the habit of turning the inverter off the instant you’re done using it. Buy jumper cables when you buy the inverter, because I guarantee you’ll drain your can battery within the first few weeks of having the inverter. Disconnect the inverter before jump starting the car. Even if the battery is dead, the inverter will likely remember that it is supposed to be on. Once you send power to it (and LOTS), it will turn on and fry itself. If this happens to you, go buy the exact same inverter again from a big box store, and return the busted one in the new packaging. It’s obvious that you should learn how to use the jumper cables (positive to positive and negative to ground, or more likely negative to negative).
Buy the Haines manual for your car and a basic tool set. Remember the days when you would drop your car off at the mechanic on Sunday night and pick it up Tuesday morning? Unless you now have a friend with a couch, that means giving up your bed and everything you own for two nights. Keep your car in top-notch condition and have it regularly maintenanced. It’s nice to be able to save some money and do your own auto work, but not everyone is mechanically inclined. At the very least, know how to change a tire. If you do need to put your car in the shop, make sure the mechanic knows you need it back the same day.
Don’t poo where you eat. For that matter, don’t do anything illegal or suspicious looking where you park at night, shower, or hang out. These places are hard to find, and losing your shower privileges or having to find a new place to sleep can be really stressful. I try to avoid cooking on university property at all cost for fear of being put on a campus police watch list.
Install curtains. Installing curtains will let you get dressed in privacy, hide your belongings, and hopefully let you get away with poaching sleeping areas while on road trips. This is much easier said than done. I’ve gone through two failed curtain systems. The first involved a lot of sticky backed Velcro and sheets from the Salvation Army. I stuck 1-inch ‘hook’ pieces of Velcro on the perimeter of the windows and cut up the sheet into pieces slightly larger than the windows. With ‘loop’ pieces of Velcro stuck to the sheets, I was able to block out 100% of visibility from the outside world. This system worked great until the heat of the summer when all of the Velcro adhesive turned to liquid and stopped working. After an hour of scraping the windows with a razor blade and scrubbing glass with WD-40 and steel wool, I had clean, glue-free windows. I started a similar design from scratch by gluing the hook side of non-sticky-backed Velcro to the windows with Super Glue. My new curtains were made of felt. In the fabric store, the Velcro stuck really well to the felt. After a few days in use, the felt started to pull apart. Then the super glue started to fail. My third, and hopefully final, system uses 1-minute epoxy and Veltex, a fabric that is specially designed to stick to Velcro. Updates later.
Find a few bookstores and coffee shops to hang out at. Bookstores are great because you can read anything you want and listen to music without paying a cent. Coffee shops are nice too, but it’s often hard to find free internet access at either locale. Libraries and academic institutions are your best bet for free internet. I’ve heard that McDonalds and Starbucks now offer free internet, so that’s a great resource when you’re on the road. Colleges with an engineering program are likely to have community buildings open 24/7. Thank those nerds every once in a while when you’re watching movies at 3am and they’re studying so hard that gray matter is oozing out of their ears.
Backup your laptop data. Memories are great, but when you’re telling stories to the grandkids in 50 years they’ll want to see photos. Make sure you don’t loose all those photos from your epic trip when someone breaks into your van. Upload your photos in full-resolution to an online back-up service, copy them to an external hard drive not stored with your laptop, or burn them to DVD and mail them to yourself.
Get a PO box and a nationally accessible bank account. Having all your important mail sent to your parents’ house is a good way to make sure it stays safe. But eventually you’ll need to order something online or have something important mailed to you. If you’re on the road, most post offices will hold mail for you under “General Delivery,” without you having to pay for a PO box. Since you’ll be on the road a lot, make sure you’ll be able to access your bank account wherever you go, without paying ATM fees or having to buy a stick of gum at the grocery store to get cash back.
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dr_feelgood
Jul 26, 2010, 12:56 AM
Post #2 of 11
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Registered: Apr 6, 2004
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misanthropic_nihilist wrote: As a last resort, most Walmarts will let you sleep in their parking lot. Despite popular belief, not all Walmarts want people sleeping in their parking lots. If you do go this route, make sure you fit in by always wearing a t-shirt of three wolves howling at the moon.
the only worthwhile advice in the entire post.
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carabiner96
Jul 26, 2010, 1:05 AM
Post #3 of 11
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Registered: Apr 10, 2006
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Go back to the first title. This is way cooler than the current title lets on.
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chadnsc
Jul 26, 2010, 2:09 AM
Post #4 of 11
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Registered: Nov 24, 2003
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Says butturt you. 
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philbox
Moderator
Jul 26, 2010, 4:12 AM
Post #5 of 11
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Registered: Jun 27, 2002
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Lemme guess, you have a lot of time on your hands due to you living out of your van.
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devkrev
Jul 26, 2010, 12:01 PM
Post #6 of 11
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Registered: Sep 28, 2004
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Well put together. Being a tall person (6'5'') I'm always thinking of ways to sleep in cars.
What do you do for work?
dev
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misanthropic_nihilist
Jul 26, 2010, 1:06 PM
Post #7 of 11
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Registered: Sep 13, 2005
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Yea, being over 6' makes it hard just to sleep with straight legs in most cars.
I inspect historic building facades for work. I'm usually on the road for a week or so every month, and in the office 9-5 the rest of the time.
You're right about having lots of free time. I use my laptop for less than 20 minutes a day outside of work, and I never have an easy place to sit around and do nothing, so I'm constantly looking for exciting things to do.
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wjca
Jul 27, 2010, 3:16 PM
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misanthropic_nihilist wrote: Yea, being over 6' makes it hard just to sleep with straight legs in most cars. I inspect historic building facades for work. I'm usually on the road for a week or so every month, and in the office 9-5 the rest of the time. You're right about having lots of free time. I use my laptop for less than 20 minutes a day outside of work, and I never have an easy place to sit around and do nothing, so I'm constantly looking for exciting things to do.
Historic Building Inspector? You sure you're not a traveling Motivational Speaker living in a VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!!!
Editing is weak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcR7hr4LLQg
(This post was edited by wjca on Jul 27, 2010, 3:18 PM)
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caughtinside
Jul 27, 2010, 3:54 PM
Post #9 of 11
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Registered: Jan 8, 2003
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Nice setup and a good writeup. I lived in my Dodge van for a year and it was rad. I still have it for climbing and camping trips but I got domesticated by the gf so I'm indoors now. Still love the van though, I used to wake up in the coolest places in that thing.
Pros and cons for the van... it's got more interior space and my bed is semi permanent. So more storage too. High clearance which comes in handy once in a while. Slower and drinks way more gas though. I get 17 mpg at 65 and 19mpg if I drive 60.
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Arrogant_Bastard
Jul 29, 2010, 12:38 AM
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caughtinside wrote: Still love the van though, I used to wake up in the coolest places in that thing.
Like, down by the river. And sometimes, for a change of pace, the other side of the river.
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caughtinside
Jul 29, 2010, 12:39 AM
Post #11 of 11
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Arrogant_Bastard wrote: caughtinside wrote: Still love the van though, I used to wake up in the coolest places in that thing. Like, down by the river. And sometimes, for a change of pace, the other side of the river.
Dude, the living is swete, down by the river.
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